‘I can’t help but myth-make my life in real time’ 🍏
The opposite of smooth brain
Hello Prox Populi,
Do you remember internal monologue discourse?
Yo wtf… just saw a stat that said only 30-50% of people have an internal dialogue. There’s really 50%+ of the population out here walking around with NOTHING going on in their head??
As someone who’s felt dumb for not having an internal narrator, I was relieved to learn I wasn’t alone. (Though like most things on the internet, the post that went viral is an inaccurate reading of the research.)
For years, I yearned to have as much to say have as my friends. To be able to recall the exact moment we met, like they could. To spout stories about anything and everything. Just this weekend, a friend was recounting a tricky interaction and spoke of how he “saw everything play out in his head,” and I marveled at his mental chess moves.
Was I just not as deep? Not as observant? A simpleton with reptile brain? I’m hot, I’m hungry, I’m cold, I want to sleep.
This week on the show, I talked to a writer who sometimes wishes she could have a quieter brain like mine and frankly, it was healing.
Amanda Montell is a NYT bestselling author (The Age of Magical Overthinking, Cultish, Wordslut) and the host of the popular podcasts Magical Overthinkers and Sounds Like a Cult. She’s made a living out of harnessing her internal narrator but wonders:
When you’re constantly telling stories about your life, is it possible to authentically experience it?
Here’s a taste of what our proxy Jonathan Adler, a psychology professor at Olin College of Engineering, shared with Amanda on the show.
Jonathan studies narrative identity—a term psychologists use for the idea that “the best way to think about identity is as a story.” It develops in teenagehood but “before that, we’re practicing” and the kinds of stories we hear growing up shape how we tell stories.
“There's really interesting research on the gendered ways in which this plays out … that shows that both fathers and mothers tend to tell their little boys stories about what happened to them, like, ‘We went to the zoo,’ and they tell their little girls stories about how they felt about what happened to them and so that then prepares people to be different kinds of narrators of their own lives. They've learned, ‘The raw material that is supposed to go into my life story is different.’”
What we might think of as having a “bad” memory—like not being able to remember specific facts about what we experienced—is actually what makes our memory useful, he said.
“Across our species, our memories are actually quite bad. We're actually bad at remembering the objective facts that happen to us, and for a long time, that really annoyed cognitive scientists, and they were like, ‘Why do we have this very elaborate system in the brain that's not good at the thing that it should be good at?’ But there was a real turning point in the history of the field where folks realized that if you think about why we have memory in the first place from an evolutionary perspective, it's actually not to hold on to everything that happens to us. …
“Why do we need memory now? We need it so we can navigate the present and anticipate the future, and the present and the future are never an exact replica of the past. So if we could only hold on to the past exactly as it happened, it actually wouldn't be that useful to us.”
The stories you create about your life in your head actually live “in the space between you and other people,” Jonathan said. You’re constantly revising these stories.
“Ultimately, even though we think about narrative identity as a story … that lives in our head, it's also a story that exists to be told,” he said. “Stories are meant to be told. There's a wonderful paper in my field called ‘Selves Creating Stories Creating Selves’, and the idea is you create the story and then you perform the story and you get feedback on that story and then the feedback you get is going to inform the way you tell it the next time.
“So I love the idea of thinking about it not as a story that only lives in your head that is lonely and you're in charge of, but it's always been a story that lives in the space in between you and the other people. You tell it, they give you feedback, sometimes verbally, sometimes non verbally. You rejigger the story, try it again the next time. And that live revision of our story has actually always been the default mode of how narrative identity plays out.”
PROX VOX
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Thanks to listener a.lauber for this Apple Podcasts review. I’m gonna put this one in my pocket and save for a rainy day.
IN THE WILD
Evan from our Is It Time To Break Up The Band ep told me he can’t believe that Craig Finn from The Hold Steady now knows who he is. And feeling moved by this write up about the band ep by longtime music journalist and musician Jeff Miers.
Jeff writes:
“We believe that being in a band meant working hard, becoming good at what we did, putting in the hours, reaping adulation, and ultimately, buying a house in Malibu with a super-sick recording studio in it, where all our bandmates/best friends could gather and work on music in a perfectly balanced democratic state, until we grew old and grey together… That’s the dream. More often (much more often), the reality is something quite different. Particularly for bands that stay together for more than a decade, without ever growing immensely popular, but rather, staying close enough to success to smell it, while failing to grab a firm hold of it. So what happens then? What if your dreams refuse to die, while simultaneously refusing to come true?”
Your emotional investigative journalist,
Yowei
Edited by Juliana Feliciano Reyes.